Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Surplus in a Connected Age

In the acknowledgements to this, Clay Shirky’s second book, he thanks Web 2.0 conference organiser Jennifer Pahlka for “insisting on my giving a talk about something new” just after he’d finished promoting Here Comes Everybody, his 2008 book about the ways in which the internet makes it possible to ‘organise without organisations’. The result is a follow-on volume in many ways. Shirky looks beyond how the internet has changed the media and business models to investigate the impact of social media and how we can benefit from their deployment. Shirky argues these technologies allow those living in affluent cultures to make more productive use of their free time and that they have liberated us from the dependence on television to fill our lives. The ‘cognitive surplus’ of the title is the cumulative creativity of the non-TV watching public, used for purposes that range from the light-hearted and trivial to the truly transformative – from captioned pictures of cute cats to reporting sites of ethnic unrest in Kenya. Well-written and well-argued, this book offers a contribution to the ongoing debate about the impact of digital technologies that should be read and digested now, before the onslaught of innovation makes its insights seem commonplace. Bill Thompson is a web columnist for Focus

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